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Social media has become an important internet tool in our daily life. Youth can't imagine their life without social media and the internet. It has been observed that internet users tremendously increased in the past few years in India (Ayyar, 2018). According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), India becomes the second country after China in terms of internet users. One of the recent projections by IAMAI and Kantar Research stated that internet users will be expected to reach over 900 million by 2025 (IAMAI & Kantar, 2021), currently, after China, India is the second biggest social media market worldwide with close to 639 million social media users and expected to 1 billion till 2026 (Statista, 2021). The reason behind this drastically increased internet usage is the increased bandwidth, cheap data plans, affordable smartphones, and awareness driven by internet service providers (Statista, 2019). Majorly Internet has been used for social media, entertainment, and web surfing (Statista, 2019). The Digital users in India were 624 million in February 2021 and among these digital users, 310 million were using social media (Statista, 2019). From the previous studies, it is also well evident that excessive internet usage leads to detrimental social and psychological effects (Diomidous et. al, 2016; Bessière et. al, 2010).
As internet users are increasing in India, it becomes important to the concern about the cognitive consequences of internet usage from the Indian perspective. It was found that approximately 90% of the young aged people use social media, in which most of them are using more than two platforms of social media and surfing these sites (Perrin, 2015). Two-Thirds of the Facebook users in India are from age 15 to 29 years (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2019). Some studies reported the impact of social media on mental health (e.g., sleep problems, anxiety, and lower self-esteem; Ehrenreich & Underwood, 2016; Woods & Scott, 2016; Shukla & Chouhan, 2020). Due to the availability of different social media platforms, university students are likely to use more than one social media platform simultaneously leads to the possible impact of media multitasking behavior that has been under investigation for years. Due to this, it becomes important to understand the influence of social media multitasking behavior on different cognitive perspectives.
According to UCLA, Psychologists report in “Multitasks adversely affects how you learn”, Poldrack (2006) states that individuals don’t learn much in multitasking as compared to when they pay full attention. This is due to distractions while learning affects the ability of the brain to absorb information and results in poor memory in the long run. Researchers also agreed that this is one of the factors why children do not perform well in school (University of California - Los Angeles, 2006). Related to academic performance, Lau (2017) found that social media multitasking negatively predicts a student's academic performance (Seyyed et al., 2019).